Close the Board Room Closet

When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else—we are the busiest people in the world. – Eric Hoffer

I don’t remember ever being this busy. Not even that time in the fourth grade when I was starring as Johnny Appleseed in our class play, learning to play the autoharp, and simultaneously creating my report on Missouri, the “Show Me” state, in a cardboard box panorama (I believe the Latin term for it is“Cardboardorama®”). Remember that fantastic technology? Those stories drawn on long paper rolled between two dowels inside a box decorated to look like a TV set? It was like watching the merry history of those stubborn Missourians unfurl before your very eyes.

Now, many years later, I’m scaring myself and small children with my to-do lists. On Saturday, my head exploded. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but my eyes defi nitely did bulge out a bit at the sheer enormity of all the things I need to do, the things falling through the cracks, things halfway done with no time to fi nish them because we’re off and running to the next happy thing; then there are the things I forgot to do (Meglet, if you’re reading this, I hope you had a fantastic birthday, girlfriend! You too, Lora!). It was bound to happen, this spontaneous combustion. I knew life was at Orange Alert level when I wasn’t sending thank you notes in a Timely Fashion.  

I could finally stand it no longer, this Angst of Overwhelm.  

So I cleared the sidewalk chalk and cheerful biography of Poincaré off the dining room table and sat down by myself with a nice fountain pen and a legal pad, one with satisfyingly thick sheets where the ink says “ahhhhh” as it glides on. And I sat and wrote and wrote and wrote, like writer Malcolm Lowry on a drunken binge under a volcano but without the worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle and without all the sweat he used to sweat. But I didn’t stand up to write like he did (before he inevitably fell down), so maybe it isn’t the best comparison.

I wasn’t writing the Great American novel, no. I was just writing my to-do list. Not in any theme or priority, just listing page after page of all I needed to do.

There were big things, like: paint the house, raise two children, fi gure out how much I’m paying per minute for long distance once and for all, and provide what I’m sure would be invaluable input to the human genome project. There were also smaller items: fi nd the missing sandal, get stamps, sharpen the knives, drink more water, and get my parking sticker at the university. There were literally hundreds of them—yellow brick legal-pad roads of things that needed to be done, all rolling around in my head and causing not so unconscious anxiety, what with their not being done and my teetering on the precipice of forgetting to do them.

As I wrote to move them out of my head to clear space for things like social security numbers, customer ID numbers, account numbers, and the square root of 389302, I felt like I was sliding further and faster into the morass of undone things, paralyzed by the enormity of it all. Then I looked at the pile of writing in front of me and remembered a story I once heard novelist Toni Morrison tell.

Early in her career, Morrison worked at Random House publishers. One day her head exploded just as mine had, and she started her list of to-do items. She wrote pages and pages of things that she must do. Faced with the long list, she sat and looked at it for a long while, fi nally asking herself one question: “What is it I must do or I shall die?”

After answering that question, there were only two things left on her to-do list: 1) Be a mother to her children. 2) Write.

I used to work for a big national association, with about 600 chapters around the U.S. Every year, the leaders of those chapters would come to Washington, D.C., to a big pep rally leadership development program, and every year, we would host them for a reception at our national headquarters building, which meant we had to clean up as if Grandma (who starched and ironed her bed linens) was coming to dinner.

One year, my offi ce was particularly messy and I was late in preparing for the Big Event. Very Important Papers and Files covered my desk and every horizontal surface, all demanding immediate attention. To give my offi ce a hip, Zen, minimalist organized vibe for the onslaught of chapter presidents, I just swept all those do-it-or-die action fi les into a big box and wrestled it into the Board Room closet.

My office was immaculate! I was the self-proclaimed winner of the office decorating contest! I looked über organized! What a great solution! I patted myself on the back as the reception began. This Board Room strategy actually worked so well that the next year I did exactly the same thing. And that time, when I opened the Board Room closet with the box perched on my hip, there sat proudly the unopened and forgotten box of Vital, Time Sensitive, Ultra Important fi les from the year before.

I guess doing all that stuff wasn’t really so vital, after all. None of it got done. Nobody died. Life went on, less frenetic, less fractured, more focused, more full.

Do it now Challenge: Today, for an hour (or more, if you can!), do only one thing at a time. If you are drinking coffee, you can’t check email. If you are talking t­o your neighbor, you can’t be folding laundry. If you are walking to get your mail, you can’t be talking on your cell phone. If you are eating, you can’t be reading. One. Thing. At. A. Time. Try it. Then sit down and make your “do or die” list.

Patti Digh is author of the award-winning blog, 37days (pattidigh.com). This essay is excerpted from her next book of essays on living a more intentional and authentic life, LIFE IS A VERB, forthcoming from Skirt! Books in October 2008. She can be reached at patti@thecircleproject.com.

~Patti Digh